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Is the Geforce 7800 GTX worth it? I'll show you...  XML
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edomingox

Dominating

Joined: 05/22/2005 16:57:45
Messages: 247
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Ok. Some people wonder, is a $500 graphics card actually worth it? Let me show you some benchmarks.

3DMark05 is a program that measures your systems performance. This is the performance on a pentium 3.0 Ghz with the Geforce 6800 Ultra 256MB card. I bought the 6800 Ultra for $500 last year when it came out.






And here is my in-game frames per second.






The settings I have for UT is maximum on all textures and details and the resolution is 1600x1200. It may be hard to see but the average FPS here is 29. There is a lot of action going on so I tried to take a shot where it loaded the card very heavily.

If you want to compare how yours might stand up, just go to your settings and max it all out and see what kind of frames per second you get. In case you forgot how to display your FPS, go to the console (~) and then type 'stat fps' without the quotes of course. Also, don't forget to max out your resolution. That will also depend on how far your monitor will go. Mine has a natural resolution of 1600x1200 and can go even higher. I didnt use 1900x1200 because that is made for widescreen monitors. FYI, I have the Samsung Syncmaster 997DF ($200). You can also download 3DMark05 for free, just Google it.

This is very nice to play on. But as most greedy people are, I wanted more. So I upgraded to the AMD 64 4000 and the Geforce 7800 GTX PCI Express. For those who don't know what PCI Express is, it's a new graphics card interface on the motherboard. Most older graphics cards and motherboards are AGP. AGP will support up to x8, which means about 8 pipelines. The slot the graphics card goes into the motherboard is much different than the PCI Express. The PCI Express is a x16 which basically doubles the pipelines. Your motherboard will either support AGP or PCI Express but not both. Be aware that by next year, I would suspect that most all new graphics cards will be PCI Express and if you want one, you'll have to upgrade your motherboard and cpu to get it.

Now, let's see how the new Geforce 7800 GTX looks. Here are my benchmarks.





As you can see, the new benchmarks totally blows away my old 3 Ghz. Now what does this mean? It means I have a high score. So who cares about that, let's see how the game is. Here's my new frames per second. Now if I was to guess how older systems compare, I would say a 2.0 Ghz with the Geforce 5 Series cards (5700, 5900, etc.) would be pulling about 2500-3000 in the benchmark test and about 10-15 fps in-game during high action situations, but I may be a bit generous with those numbers.





I now get an average of 48 frames per second. Anything in the green is very good. I took this screenshot on the same map but with even more stuff going on. And by the way, since I been playing with this new setup, this is the lowest fps I have had so far. I average about 85 fps with all max settings and 1600x1200 resolution on every map so far with minor action.

here's another comparable frames per second screen. On the connecting screen, where's its all black and gets ready to load the new map, my old system got 600 fps. My new system gets 1300 fps.

So if you have the money to spend, I would say that this new graphics card is extremely good. It even runs 20 degrees Celsius lower ( at 41 Celsius) than the 6800 in idle which is weird for such a powerful card. I even turned on the anti-aliasing on the card to the max (8xS) and I only saw a drop of about 20 fps. What anti-aliasing does is it smoothens out the straight edges. It's really good for games where you do a lot of exploring and take the time to look at things, but for a high paced game like this, you will not notice a difference.

All this info might help you decide how well your system compares to a higher system. It may help you see how your graphics card and cpu compares too. Other ways to improve your fps would be to get more RAM. My system has 2GB in it right now.

So what am I doing with my old $500 graphics card? It's in my babe's computer. Her system is an AMD 3200 and she gets about half my framerates. Basically, my system doubled my old system, that's a %100 increase in performance. Going from a 5900XT to the 6800 Ultra on her systems was a about a 50% increase in performance.

I really like my new system. Although I wish it wasn't so expensive ($1000), I feel I got my money's worth. I can play any game up to todays date with maximum settings and get an above average display.

And as for the upcoming UT2007, I'll be ready to play it the way it is meant to be played.


My Rating: 5 Stars out of 5 (Highly Recommended)

Pros:

Very, very good frame rates.
EVGA version comes with Battlefield 2.
Many more bells and whistles dealing with TV and graphics.
Runs at a very low temperature.
Most likely to outperform your monitor and cpu.

Cons:
Expensive.
Need to upgrade to PCI-E motherboard.
Expensive.
And lastly, Expensive.

My character skin -
http://skincity.beyondunreal.com/?section=skins&action=show_infos&id=1513
or
http://www.utzone.de/include.php? path=content/download.php&contentid=4280
http://friends.GameFly.com/r/5c9eec123614102a919d
Mystic

Godlike

Joined: 12/21/2004 21:36:56
Messages: 417
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not every card is made for gameing .. the new 78 from nividia is baseicly for 3d animation desighn n gameing ,,the card is very expensive but if your a true gamer and want the best ,, thats it.. radeon cant compar to it atm .. personaly i wouldnt pay 500 for any card .but if u want it and can afford it go for it.. nice card.
[Yahoo!]
edomingox

Dominating

Joined: 05/22/2005 16:57:45
Messages: 247
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the 7800 is meant for gaming. it is also meant for playing dvds with high film quality and has hdtv capability. the cards for 3d animation are the quadro cards. those cost $1200 and up. it will be about 3-4 years before this card becomes affordable.

some people pay $2000 to supercharge a 1975 mustang. some people just love their hobby.

My character skin -
http://skincity.beyondunreal.com/?section=skins&action=show_infos&id=1513
or
http://www.utzone.de/include.php? path=content/download.php&contentid=4280
http://friends.GameFly.com/r/5c9eec123614102a919d
cplmac

Wicked Sick!
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Joined: 12/19/2004 21:10:38
Messages: 1464
Location: chicago burbs
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I believe the 7800 has 24 pipelines to, which is amazing considering a year or so ago the high end cards had 8-12, and my still somewhat high end 6800GT has 16. Nice comparison, good info. Maximum PC just built a dual everything computer, dual dual core amd cpu's, dual terabyte storage, and yes dual 7800's running in SLI. Interestingly they noted that the bottleneck was occuring with their CPU's, essentially the video cards were processing faster than the CPU's could. Not surprisingly this machine destroyed most of their benchmarks in true Viking fashion. Oh yeah, and they were running the as yet unreleased sound blaster audigy xt, which is many times more powerful than the curren audigy 2 ZS card.

good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
edomingox

Dominating

Joined: 05/22/2005 16:57:45
Messages: 247
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i saw that article. it was pretty cool. i saw benchmarks for dual 7800 surpassing 35000 points. crazy stuff. the good thing about the 7800 is that its way ahead of its time and will be able to keep up with every m/b and cpu out there for several years.

My character skin -
http://skincity.beyondunreal.com/?section=skins&action=show_infos&id=1513
or
http://www.utzone.de/include.php? path=content/download.php&contentid=4280
http://friends.GameFly.com/r/5c9eec123614102a919d
Mac_Knife

Rampage
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Joined: 01/25/2005 21:31:29
Messages: 141
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35000 points? That cant be 3dmark05.

My skin: http://skincity.beyondunreal.com/?section=skins&action=show_infos&id=1980
edomingox

Dominating

Joined: 05/22/2005 16:57:45
Messages: 247
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your probably right. that or mark01. i can't find the article again but i didnt look to see what 3dmark it was. i think the highest they got with 05 is little over 13000.

My character skin -
http://skincity.beyondunreal.com/?section=skins&action=show_infos&id=1513
or
http://www.utzone.de/include.php? path=content/download.php&contentid=4280
http://friends.GameFly.com/r/5c9eec123614102a919d
 
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